


Abrazo

by rageprufrock



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-13
Updated: 2011-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-23 17:24:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John hears the music in Weir's office and gets the idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Abrazo

John hears the music in Weir's office and gets the idea.

 

 *****

 

Three days later, flat on his back fighting for breath and thinking "I'm too fucking old for this" and "Fuck, she beat me wearing a skirt--again" he says out loud, "How'd you like to learn to dance?"

 

 *****

 

When John asked to borrow the CD, Elizabeth had smiled and shook her head, saying, "It's not really mine to lend--I borrowed it from Dr. Kavanagh."

John made a face.  "Kavanagh listens to tango music?"

"You do non-linear geometry, Major," Weir chided, but she was smiling.  "You could ask to borrow it yourself."

"Fantastic," John muttered.  "They're going to find me wearing lipstick, handcuffed to a radiator."

 

 *****

 

Luckily for everybody involved, John is wearing neither lipstick nor catering to Kavanagh's reportedly--okay, reported by Rodney--twisted sexual desires.

Instead, he is sitting in one of the smaller labs touching random things and letting Kavanagh bitch about Rodney.  After a while, the litany of insults melts into a soothing white noise, and John just cradles crystal orbs and silver grails and crystalline machinery, feeling Atlantis bubble into waking beneath his hands.  Arching up into him, yearning, alive.

Later, Rodney will accost John in the hallway for being a philandering experimental variable but John will be holding the Gotan Project CD and Rodney will become white noise, too.

 

 *****

 

Teyla's got a rhythm in the way she moves, the hyperbolic curves of her arms and legs and how she extends them when she's fighting, not all straight lines and fast edges the way John was taught, but like a ripple.  He's caught himself watching her prepare to kick his ass and been impressed by it, wondered what she'd be like swaying to a beat instead of beating him.

 

 *****

 

"My people have dancing as well," Teyla says, hesitant.

"I've seen it," John assures her with a lopsided smile, "and it's lovely, but this is a little different."

The laptop stops humming and music starts, like clapping and heartbeats, violin muffled by flesh and humidity, and John has always thought tango sounded like angry sex--the very best kind.  John wishes it'd be louder, not so tinny from the crappy laptop speakers, and Atlantis curves up against his thoughts, echoes the music through the room like a concert hall, and Teyla's eyes widen at it.

"This music is very..." she trails off.

John smiles, all teeth, and holds out his hand.  "Isn't it?"

 

 *****

 

During the hot, lazy summer John was seventeen his father was stationed at Lackland.  It was the closest he'd been to Houston and what passed off as a hometown since he'd been two years old.  It'd been dusty and brown and John had spent a lot of time bored out of his skull, not bothering to unpack or make his bed because they were moving in two months, anyway.  John spent daylight hours sleeping long and late, crawling out of bed to go swimming or run around, take the metal detector his dad gave him for his tenth birthday and scour the sides of local highways--out to watch the planes.

Four weeks into it John had caught a lift out to San Antonio with a few airmen on weekend leave and heard tango music for the first time, naked and intoxicatingly red, thumping in his veins.

 

 *****

 

"This is like fighting to music," Teyla says with some amusement, muscles tense under John's hands, which are gentle if rough, all calloused from holding guns and doing pushups and  snapping peoples' necks.

John smirks.  "It's a little about push and pull.  There aren't really any moves--I move and you follow, basically."

"Why must I follow you?" Teyla asks, cocking her brow, playful but warning.

"It's called leading, and mostly because I'm taller," John says humbly.  "I can see where we're going on the dance floor so we don't bump into anybody."

Teyla looks around the empty practice room.

"Imaginary anybodys," John revises.  He grins.

Teyla's expression turns thoughtful, and John steps back from her enough so that he's only touching her hand and waist.  "Just follow my feet, move with me," John says encouragingly.

Teyla laughs, finally, shoulders loosening, and she says, "This seems like a terribly private thing to be doing in front of other people, Major."

"Tell me about it," John says, tugs her in close, so that she can feel the movement of his muscles, anticipate his lean, and feel the brush of his thigh against hers--and he moves.

 

 *****

 

A few days after the first time he finagled a seat--in the loosest sense of the word--on Harry Rodman and Archie Thomas' weekend leave, and he got it because he promised he'd keep his damn mouth shut about them driving out to the Hector, one of Those Bars that good airmen didn't go to if they wanted to get to Lt. or Major, or full maturity.

"You're a slick, observant little shit, Sheppard," Rodman complained.

"Thanks," John said earnestly.  "It's cool.  I'm going through a period where I hate my father.  Go forth, do not breed."

Archie stopped the car in front of Rocio's, which was shaking with music by now, punctuated by trills and shouts and drums, the thump of feet.  The windows were red and shadowed with bodies and John stared for a bit from the back seat of the car before Archie said:

"Get out of the damn car, Sheppard."

John said, "Right, right," and got out of the damn car, tumbling into the stifling night and feeling the oxygen pulse to the music, right on his skin, along his spine.

 

 *****

 

"The thing about tango that you really have to get," John explains, walking Teyla across the floor of the practice room, her face all curious and flushed, "is that it's not about me at all, really."

"Despite the fact that you are leading," Teyla says, deadpan.

"I am the steering wheel," John says back, equally sober.  "You are the driver.  All dance--uh, Earth dance, anyway--is really about women."

"You will have to explain this more," Teyla tells him.

John could talk about the same shit drunk guys at Rocio's all those years ago told him, about women and how lush and amazing and beautiful they were, how they smelled gorgeous, like home and sex and savior.  John could talk about how woman astounded him, with their lithe arms and long necks and their small, birdlike bones, their hands--but he settles on saying:

"The point is to show off the girl, make everybody see how beautiful she is."

Teyla beams at this.  "I see," she demurs.

"How am I doing?" John asks, rocking back a step, and feeling her feet meet his motion, step back with him, in perfect time to the music and feels a languid satisfaction pool in his stomach.  He's missed this.

"What is it that Dr. McKay says," Teyla starts.  "Stop fishing?"

John says, "You've got to spend less time with him," and brightens, adding, "Hey, lemme show you a boleo."

 

 *****

 

"Arrabalero," is the first thing anybody said to John when he finally got up the balls to walk into Rocio's, where every single person in the place was dancing, with the tables pressed to the edges of the room, the band sweating in the low light, the bartender mixing drinks to the beat.

John looked around until he saw a woman leaning against the wall, a sheen of sweat glossing the rise of her breasts and he lost his ten years of Spanish for a minute before he managed, "Hey, that's not nice!" over the sound of the music.

She raised her eyebrow at him.  "You speak?"

"Yeah," John said defensively, though he knew more slang than Castilian, much to the horror of every single Spanish teacher he'd ever had.

Then she'd looked him up and down, grabbed him by the arm, and jerked him out onto the floor.

John would reflect in the years afterward that it was slightly depressing that most of his encounters with the opposite sex involved him being confused, terrified, and told to shut up and move.

"I don't know what I'm doing!" John protested.

"You're supposed to push, pull, adelante, atras!" she yelled at him, hands much more patient than her voice, feet slower, easing John into basico, eight steps, easy to remember, like geometry with flesh.  "Al costado, izquierda, derecha, derecho," she instructed.

John just stared at their feet, let the music move him: to the side, left, right, and straight.

 

 *****

 

After a while, Teyla stops looking shifty about being all but shoved around the floor and melts  into her role, eyes bright with discovery as the music switches track after track, personality and variation after style of tango: Buenos Ares to the old dancehouses, where women of ill repute danced with boarders and politicians condemned them for sins of flesh.  They all sound like invitations to John, he's sweating and aching and it's great--can't believe it's been so long since he's done this.

"Barrida, Llevada," John says, his foot sweeping Teyla's flirtatiously, and she does it back, astounded, before she pulls him forward again, pressure on his fingers clutched tight in her hand.

She learns that if she grips his shoulder, slides her hips, John will bend to her bidding, will learn to anticipate her so he can anticipate them, and smooth them around the room like some sort of thick, scarlet accident along the beats.

And John wonders if this is what it's like to be Atlantis, rising to his touch, glad to provide, happy to move to her, move with her, move for her, just as the city lit up and shifted for him.

 

 *****

 

"Caminar," the woman instructed him, and John said:

"What, we're walking now?"

She narrowed her eyes and pinched him.  "Do you know how to do this?"

"No," John admitted, and started to feel as if he'd be better off with Thomas and Rodman at Hector's.

"Then stop asking questions: caminar," she said again, and John walked with her, careful, ball of his feet to the heel in an awkward, new roll that seemed to move better with the music, which had only gotten more humid and hot since he'd stepped into the club.  Sweat was beading on his skin and his upper lip and his hair was flat against his forehead from the heat.

They walked, she slid her feet over his own, she almost tipped them over, showing him Apilado style.

When John checked his watch it was half past two in the morning, which was probably late enough that his father was popping his heart medication again.  He turned to the woman, who had settled onto the front steps of Rocio next to where he'd collapsed, knees wobbling from exhaustion, aching from strain, and asked, "Hey, thanks for the lesson."

She smirked and waved her hand dismissively.  "Did you see everybody looking?  I was the most beautiful thing on the dance floor tonight.  Thank you."

John looked at her long and hard, the soft, imperfect curves of her body, the fringe of her dark hair going wild in the humidity, her wide, open face and her deep eyes, and said, "Yeah, you were, weren't you?"

The month after that, John moved to Seymour Johnson in North Carolina.

There, he picked up golf, and a case of mono.  All in all, he liked Lackland more.

 

 *****

 

John's overextending himself and he's forgotten that thing where he's almost thirty-three now when he and Teyla end up toppling over midpractice to land in bruised, sweaty heaps side by side on the floor.

"That was wonderful, Major," Teyla says, helping him off the floor, a sweaty, huge smile on her face.  "Thank you."

The CD cuts off, and John grins in the silence, feeling his knees creak.

"My pleasure, Teyla," he says and winks.

John's still all buzzed up from the music, even after he's taken a shower and changed his clothes and tormented Rodney by touching things that don't respond to Rodney's gene therapy for half an hour, so he takes a long walk to the South pier and stares out into the dark, alien night.

He's almost zoned out, staring into the vast hugeness of the sky, laying back with his hands pillowed under his head when Rodney's enormous face comes into focus, sneering above him.

"Gah!"

"And what, pray tell, were you doing with Teyla in the practice room today, Captain Kirk?" Rodney asks, accusing.  "You went in grinning too much and came out all sweaty and hyper and  _mean_ \--" Rodney emphasizes this, like he hasn't won the Biggest Asshole On Atlantis award fourteen months running "--and I don't like it, mister!"

"Well," John drawls, "it's a practice room, and from that, one may intuit that it is used for prac--"

"Okay, my offer of honorary membership to the Atlantis chapter of MENSA is totally rescinded," Rodney says hotly.  "I heard music--I think everybody in the city did.  What were you doing?"

There's something about Rodney McKay that just makes John want to fuck with him.  Rodney's the kind of guy who convinced himself he was always right at the age of two and has been ever since, and John can't help but want to mess with his head a little, so John grins and stands up.

Rodney looks suspicious.  "What are you doing?"

John leans in, close, and says, "I could show you what we were doing."

Rodney's eyes go huge and his throat seems to close up and there is total, complete silence for about half a beat before Rodney squeaks, "Um."

John takes the opportunity to take Rodney's hand and pull him into a loose hold, and on his face there is a huge smile that he's been told a lot makes him look like a jackass when he says:

"Now, the key to dancing is to make your partner beautiful, and--" John pauses, looks Rodney down to up and sees Rodney's stunned-slack face go from incredulousness to fury "--this may take some work in your case, but I'm willing to try if you--"

John doesn't get a chance to finish his sentence before Rodney yells, "Oh that's very funny!" and shoves John into the ocean before storming back inside.

John's still laughing hysterically, hiccupping water when he crawls back onto the pier, and he flops onto his back, staring up at the sky, feeling quiet and cool from the water--tapping out the beats he practically knows by heart into the metallic boards of the pier.


End file.
